'It was difficult just to breathe': Quebec man details escape from war-torn Ukraine

When Eliezer Sherbatov arrived back in Canada Tuesday from the calamity in Ukraine, he embraced his wife, slept beside his two-year-old daughter and met his three-month-old son for the first time. Five days earlier, he had feared he would never see his family again. 

Last Thursday, the Israeli-Canadian professional ice hockey player was with his team, HC Mariupol of the Ukrainian Hockey League, in a hotel in Druzhkivka for a game when he was awoken at 5 a.m. by the sound of a bomb exploding. 

"Then you hear a second and when things start shaking around you ... you understand that war is within our grasp," said the 30-year-old. 

Russian forces this week intensified their attacks on major urban areas, including the capital, Kyiv, and the strategic port cities of Odesa and Mariupol in the south, where Sherbatov's team lives. Amid the fighting, the humanitarian situation worsened and the international outcry against the invasion grew. More than one million people have fled Ukraine following the invasion, in the swiftest refugee exodus this century, the United Nations said Thursday, as Russian forces continued their push for control of key cities.

Long lines of cars and buses have for days been backed up at checkpoints at the borders of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and non-EU member Moldova. Others crossed the borders on foot, dragging their possessions away from the war.

Sherbatov says he knew he needed to leave the country and return home to his wife and kids in Laval, Que. He just didn't know how. 

"There's nowhere to go," he said. "You're right in the middle of nowhere in the Donetsk Oblast (province) where thousands of Russian military are on the east side ... and the west side are Ukrainian military."

Sherbatov says the first thing he did after calling his wife to reassure her was turn to Canada for help. He received only an automatic reply from Global Affairs Canada telling him to get to the nearest bomb shelter. 

"If I had listened to a copy paste email from the government ... I would still be there with my teammates under a bomb shelter waiting to die," he said.

Being also of Israeli nationality, he contacted its embassy which told him to "do everything, no questions asked, to get to Lviv" in western Ukraine, around 70 kilometres from the border with Poland.

Securing the very last ticket that day, Sherbatov waited with two teammates for the train from Druzhkivka to Liev. Before it arrived, however, he was informed by a communications worker for the military at Mariupol that the trains were being targeted. 

"There's a 50/50 per cent chance that you will survive," Sherbatov recalls hearing.

When it arrived, one of his teammates chose not to board out of fear. But Sherbatov said he put trust in God following a call with his father and boarded the train — beginning "the most difficult and stressing 24 hours [I] ever lived."

The train, which Sherbatov dubbed "the train of death," travelled through Kramatorsk and Kharkiv then through Kyiv, all of which are under heavy attack by the Russian military. Sherbatov says he didn't sleep a wink the entire ride.